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TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

System was first discovered in 2524 as part of Project Farstar

After the war Ivar Messer who is now emperor Imperator closes the system to civilians and claims it for the military

Ivar Messer used Tayac as a black site project to research new weapons and the one in Tayac was called Project Vespa, a project to find a way to weaponize terraforming to de-terraform a planet

Tayac I was terraformed and de-terraformed numerous times in this effort but in the end it was never a feasible option

Tayac was named after a Dr. Thessaly Tayac who was the one who was in charge of Project Vespa

Star at the centre is a main sequence star, yellowish/white

Three planets

Tayac I, sometimes called Vespa

There was interest in terraforming Tayac I after discovery of the system but just as they were getting started the first Tevarin war began in 2541 and resources were diverted towards that

Tayac II is a gas giant with saturn like rings around it

Tayac III is a rocky dwarf planet

The Ark was an idea put forth by a diplomatic secretary trying to unify humanity with other species

He wanted to build a place to share information, after receiving much support for this he decided to build it in Tayac as a symbol of hope since it represented the horrors of humanity from before

The old Project Vespa headquarters were then converted into the Ark

Banu, Xi'An and even Vanduul were invited to participate

Most of the knowledge and artifacts from the Banu had to be traded for as Banu didn’t understand the concept of storing information for a library or artifacts that weren’t owned by anyone

The Xi'An were still somewhat distrustful of humanity so this made it difficult as they weren’t really eager to share either

It finally opened in the year 2800 just as Leon became the new Imperator

There was some controversy from the Tevarin who had a few centuries back had the purge trying to rid themselves of their past and here were the humans gathering it up, this also might have marked the resurgence of when the Tevarin became interested in their past

Two things that came out of the Ark was the Galactapedia and the Starmap

Another thing to visit in Tayac is an art installation called the Silent Song, it was a collaboration between a human artist, Xi'An artist and Banu craftsman team

Full Transcript

Will Weissbaum: And welcome to another edition of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m your host for today Senior Writer Will Weissbaum and if you haven’t joined us before Loremaker’s Guide is a guide from us the loremakers to the galaxy. We basically take you through one of our many star systems and give you the lowdown on the lore side about all its ins and outs and happenings and it's all thanks to the absolutely fantastic Ark Starmap which we’re going to get into a lot of detail on today because of our system Tayac is actually the home of the Ark. So, let’s go head over there now, we’ll bring up… we’re starting at beautiful Earth.

So we’re going to go from Earth and we’re going to head on out to Tayac. So let’s see what size ship do I want to do, I think medium. Not the obvious choice but it works for me, twelve jumps… we don’t have that kinda time. Six jumps, costs a little bit more but it’s going to be good, let’s head out. Here we are on Sol, going to whiz on over to Davien, over to Kilian, from there to Ellis, stop enjoy a race and a hot dog. We go from there to Magnus, from there to Terra, and then we have one last final jump hopefully to… wait Magnus, what happened. Something went horribly wrong… all right, just imagine that that worked. Screw it, we’re going to do it live, we’re doing it live.

Then we arrive in Tayac, welcome. So give you a quick overview to start, this is a UEE system, it is a whopping 2.85 au astronomical units. Wide across, the star at the centre known as Tayac is a main sequence star, it’s yellowish/white and it’s got a solar radius of 0.88 which is a little bit smaller than our own sun over here in Sol. It’s got a classy greenband, which you can see that greenish area there which starts from its inner point of 0.78 au and goes all the way out to 1.13. There are three planets orbiting around Tayac star, we have Tayac I sometimes called Vespa, sometimes not and around Tayac I is our main point interest in the system which we’ll be talking a lot more about called The Ark.

We also have Tayac II which is a gas giant and it’s got saturn like rings around it as you can see here. Nicely rendered and they’re really dense so it provides a nice stark contrast against the bright gas giant so you can see these rings. It’s kind of a cool place to visit and then from there a little bit beyond Tayac II we have the Tayac belt Alpha, Alpha means it’s the first belt. So, that is quite nice and for those of you who may not be quite familiar with our solar system naming, how it works is that the star has a typically same name as the system. In this case Tayac system has a Tayac star and from there we go planets have roman numeral numbering, so the first planet in the system is Tayac One or written as Tayac I and Tayac Two would be Tayac II and from there we go moons which are written in the case of the normal number followed by a letter. So if Tayac I had a moon it would be Tayac 1A and then you go into asteroid belts which are listed with the roman alphabet. So it goes asteroid belt Alpha, asteroid belt Beta so it’s a fun thing there.

After the Tayac belt Alpha we have our final planet in the system, Tayac III which is a rocky dwarf planet and it’s pretty far out there, it’s got an orbital period of 1847 standard earth days. It’s commonly sa Shepherd because it’s kind of seen as watching over its flock of asteroids nearby. We’re going to probably leave it up to the players to decide whether it’s a fem shepherd or not but from there that’s kind of the system at a glance. Let’s dive into a little bit of the history and first of I would also like to give a shout out to all our astronomers and astrophysicist consultants who did a fantastic job in helping us get all these stats and numbers for solar systems. It’s pretty we have all these figures crunched and as the Galactapedia comes along we’ll make those more available.

So, the system was first discovered in 2524 which was part of what’s known as Project Farstar which is a big push by the United Planets of Earth, the UPE, to discover new systems for settlement. There was a whole bunch of systems discovered from this project and Tayac was one of them but because there was some discovered earlier and stuff, there was interest in terraforming Tayac I but there wasn’t enough resources at the time to get around to doing it. So it was kind of put on the backburner as focus went to other systems and by the time they started, had an orbital platform built on the planet to get going it was just in time for the first Tevarin war to break out in 2541. So they were all set to go and all of the sudden war hits, it was the first interspecies war and all the resources just get diverted to the war effort. So kind of brakes put on the Tayac system.

So the war happens and we had for the next five years heavy fighting and a young man by the name of Ivar Messer rises up the ranks becomes a big war hero and eventually will take over the government and become the first emperor Imperator of the United Empire of Earth, just started. Now rather than opening Tayac back up, what Messer ends up doing is claiming the system for the military and making it completely off limits for civilian ships. So it kind of fades from public memory for the next few centuries and it’s not until the fall of the Messer regime in 2792 that we’ll learn what was actually going on there, bom bom bom. Devious Messer plots.

So, fall of the Messers, systems open back up and a huge discovery to kind of what was going on and it turns out from his participation in the first Tevarin war really scared the crap out of Ivar Messer and he dedicated considerable resources into these black site projects to devise new devastating weapons to protect humanity if we should ever get into another war. So one of them was centred, one of the major resource projects was centred here in Tayac and it was known as Project Vespa and it was run by a Dr. Thessaly Tayac and Project Vespa’s main goal was to find a way now that we had terraforming technology, the question was could we find a way to weaponize terraforming to de-terraform planets to park outside an alien world and destroy the atmosphere really rapidly.

So this was a very popular notion and they spent years and billions credits investigating whether this was feasible and it turned and he ended terraforming and de-terraforming Tayac I numerous times, ripping the atmosphere off, putting a new one in, changing the structure in all this and just never found a way to weaponize it. Problem was by the time the giant station platform was put into place, it was really hard to do while there was a war going on and the amount of time it took to de-terraform was way too slow to actually use it as a weapon.

So, despite all this effort into creating it, it never got off the ground but because of Dr. Tayac’s effort the system was informally referred to by his name for years and that’s why the system is known as Tayac. Project Vespa is also sometimes why Tayac I is referred to as Vespa but it’s not its formal designation.

So we have this space station here, the Ark, which is kind of the bright side to this whole thing. So we have this planet here that’s actually been completely devastated by horrific research that Messer was conducting and after the fall of the regime and word got out, it was kind of upsetting to the Xi'An to learn this. We had just signed a new peace treaty and they found out we’d been researching all these ways to destroy them and so in the name of peace, the new Imperator Erin Toi, decided to share that information with them.

Along that route with the idea of sharing between cultures, she named a very young senator whose name was, I want to get this right, Marshall Leon into the position of diplomatic secretary and his job was trying to unify humanity with the other species. He saw great chance to do this by sharing even more information, his dream was to build something that he liked to call the Ark which was named after the ancient Earth legend of a, you know, a gathering of all of humanity’s creatures and knowledge in order to preserve it in the face of great adversary.

So, he put forth this proposition to build the Ark and it got huge support from the Senate and was able to build it and while there was a lot of discussion where the Ark should be built. Different senators were vying to have the resources dumped into their system but Leon was very firm that it should remain apolitical so he actually wound up deciding that Tayac would be the perfect place to kind of take this system that was representative of the horrors of humanity and convert it into a symbol of hope. So, they decided to take the old Project Vespa headquarters and convert that into the Ark.

One of the great quotes from him I really like that we have is, ‘humanity is better off with friends instead of enemies’ and so that’s kind of a nice sentiment that embodies what the Ark is all about. He got a whole bunch of the species, Banu, Xi'An… he asked them to participate, he actually asked the Vanduul to participate which just shows how eager he was as a young senator but they did not respond to his invite, which I can relate to that.

He started building the station, of course, they ran into normal problems of budget and like dealing with the Banu. To the Banu who’s really strange for them, this concept of like giving away knowledge for a library so humanity always had to trade with them as well as like the concept of storing artifacts that weren’t owned by anyone was also kind of a weird notion to them. So they weren’t quite as enthusiastic about the project as Leon would have liked so there was a lot of if we wanted stuff from them, we had to trade with them for it.

Then the Xi'An were still pretty distrustful of humanity after the Cold War so they weren’t quite as eager to share either and they were still kind of only dipping their toe into diplomacy with us. Of course the other thing with the Banu is that with renegotiations that happened with their people every several decades that also makes it hard to do a continual big project like this. He was determined to have it succeed and he invited researchers and scientists and archivists from all over the empire to donate information and soon he had grown one of the largest repositories of information ever compiled.

In the year 2800 it finally opened and this was just on the heels of Leon actually managed to run for Imperator after Erin Toi and he became the new Imperator and was just in time to see the opening of this grand project that he’d been working on for years. So it was kind of perfect in that way. He invited all the species to gather and there was actually a bit of controversy with the Tevarin because they had had the purge a few centuries earlier in the 2600s where they were trying to get rid of all their past and here were these humans gathering it all up into one place and there was kind of debate amongst them whether they were ok with that and how they felt and actually a lot of people note that the Ark might be the start of the resurgence of the Tevarin finding interest in their past.

You know, there’s been tons of visitors every year go to visit this and some great things have come out of the Ark since it’s opened. Two of the big well known ones is the Galactapedia which is available, it’s a great research source for information across the empire and the entire universe and then the other one is, of course, this grand feature which is the Starmap. Which we rely on to not only get around the system but to create these loremaker guides, that’s actually their big money maker is that it’s available to the individuals for free but commercial people who want to use it for their ship maps and stuff have to pay licensing fees.

So it’s the most up to date information, they coordinate with the ICC and all this other stuff and there’s a whole bunch of other systems that have come around stations that have been established to cater to them. There’s some great bars in the area where educational people gather to share drinks, so there’s a lot of fun there. Probably the last cool thing that I want to note is that an anniversary of the centennial of the Ark, a great awesome art installation was created in the belt that’s worth visiting, it’s called the Silent Song and it was the joint effort of a human artist, Yosef Colt and Xi'An artist Aor and a Banu craftsman team who helped build this art piece. It’s definitely something worth visiting.

So, make sure you come and visit Tayac while you can, there’s a chance that the Ark might be moving soon. So we’ll see about that and until then thank you for joining me on Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I hope to see you again. Thanks for subscribing and all your support.

Moonlighting as a writer in her spare time StormyWinters combines her passion for the written word and love of science fiction resulting in innumerable works of fiction. As the Director of Fiction, she works with a fantastic team of writers to bring you amazing stories that transport you to new places week after week.